Conference committees' work is often confusing

By Peter Bixby

Tuesday

Jun 7, 2016 at 3:15 AM

In the interest of sharing our thoughts and experiences in the New Hampshire House of Representatives, a group of Dover representatives has come together to write this weekly column on a rotating basis. We look forward to your feedback. Please send comments to the writer of each column; contact information below. Thank you

The end of the New Hampshire legislative season is dominated by committees of conference. After all House bills have been heard by the Senate, and Senate bills have been heard by the House, each chamber has to either accept the other chamber's amendments to a bill, kill the bill entirely, or resolve the differences in a committee of conference. A conference committee can only include material that was already supported by one chamber or the other. No new material can be added in an amendment. Similarly, when the conference committee reports are presented to each house, the members can make no further amendments. They can only vote yes or no. Most bills just get a voice vote, but some contentious ones will go to a roll call.

At this season, the majority party leadership has enormous power over the outcome of negotiations, because the Speaker of the House and President of the Senate have absolute power to choose the membership of the conference committees. Typically the committee will consist of two or three majority members and one minority member from each chamber, all of whom voted for the bill in their own chamber. Every member of the conference committee needs to sign off on the compromise version of the bill drafted by the committee. It would seem like a minority member would have real negotiating power because he or she could block consensus. However, the Speaker and the President can remove and replace committee members from their respective chambers at will. When a bill fails to be reconciled in Committee of Conference, it means either that the Speaker and the President fundamentally disagree on the bill, or that one or both of them want to kill a bill even though it was passed in some form by both of their chambers.

For example, HB1661, which passed the House 229-99 and in the Senate on a voice vote, would ban the use of "conversion therapy" on teens. Conversion therapy is a coercive psychological technique that attempts to force someone with a homosexual or bisexual orientation to become strictly heterosexual. Teens subjected to this "therapy" have an unusually high rate of suicide. The Senate version included a phrase saying that the law should not be seen as restriction on religious freedom. The conferees could not agree on keeping or getting rid of this phrase. Had President Morse and Speaker Jasper been committed to the will of the overwhelming majority of their chambers, they could have replaced the obstructive committee members. Instead, they chose to ignore the genuine concern the legislature exihibited for the mental health of our teenagers by letting the conference committee block passage.

One odd beast that shows up at this season is the “Christmas tree” bill. In preparation for conference committees, an uncontroversial bill will be loaded up with unrelated amendments, often drawn from bills passed narrowly, were defeated by the other chamber, or were vetoed.

One classic example of the Christmas tree is HB 1428. The underlying bill established state aid for wastewater projects. The need to invest more in clean water infrastructure has been well established and this bill was thoroughly and carefully crafted. Its “ornaments," added at the last moment by the Senate, are myriad: Shifting police training funding from a dedicated fund to the general fund, technical changes to liquor commission management, changes to river protection and management, changing the quorum for certain committees, and permitting the incineration of clean, construction-debris wood with certain limitations. The construction-debris issue was a close and contentious vote in the House, and issues surrounding the police training fund were complicated and controversial. But few people were willing to sacrifice the underlying bill for the sake of the “ornaments” they objected to. The conference committee report passed on a voice vote in both houses. Similarly, HB 1503 was an uncontroversial bill clarifying what political advertising is banned inside polling places. Added to it were an absolutely necessary, though non-germaine, amendment to make the insurance rules for certain state employees meet federal law and one that attached a tobacco tax bill the governor had vetoed. In this case, the first amendment insured the passage of the bill despite the second one: 23-1 in the Senate, and a voice vote in the House.

Another variation on the Christmas tree theme is SB-485, which contained funding for enforcing drug laws and a less-than-ideal resolution to funding state-employees' Medicare premiums. The House rejected the conference report, but because the "Granite Hammer" portion of the bill is critical for stopping the flow of opioid drugs into the state, the Governor has called the Legislature back for a special session. Hopefully the result will be a clean bill that both Houses can agree to.

Peter Bixby represents Strafford 17 in the NH Legislature and can be reached at peter.bixby@leg.state.nh.us.

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